GAME MECHANICS: EVERYTHING ABOUT STAMINA

I'm starting a series exclusively here on Patreon where I tell you about the various game mechanics of Tales of Rein Ravine in more detail than I've done anywhere else. Bits and pieces of this stuff you might have previously read about on my Instagram, but since I've taken down a big chunk of the earlier posts due to them not being a good example of the game anymore, most of it is gone.

Today's topic is the HORSE'S STAMINA and how this element affects the gameplay.

The horse has two kinds of stamina: endurance and jump stamina. I will use the video above for reference in the following paragraphs. The actual UI elements shown in the video, their placement and their style, is likely not final.

ENDURANCE

Endurance defines how long you can ride at a high speed before needing to cool down. The endurance meter is up in the top left corner, the one with a water drop 💧 in the middle. When cantering, the horse loses a fraction of its stamina every second. How much stamina is lost depends on how fast you are cantering as well as whether it's a flat surface versus downhill or uphill. Riding at maximum canter speed is much more exhausting than going half of maximum canter speed.

When trotting and walking the horse begins to cool down. This also means that the game lets you walk and trot infinitely without losing any stamina. If you ride carelessly and your horse runs out of stamina entirely, your horse will refuse to canter, gallop and jump for a certain period of time, until it's completely cooled down.

JUMP STAMINA

The jump stamina bar is the purple one in the bottom right corner. Jump stamina defines how many times a horse can jump at it's maximum scope within a short period of time, until it gets over-exhausted and refuses to jump. This can be a somewhat harder concept to understand, so I feel like a more in depth explanation is needed.

First thing you need to know is that each time you press the spacebar, the following jump's height is dependent on two things: the individual horse's scope, and the canter speed at the time of jumping.

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EXAMPLE   Pete The Pony's maximum scope is 120 centimeters (measured by a triple bar of said height). To achieve this jump height, Pete needs to canter at his maximum speed at the time of jumping. If Pete canters at his slowest canter speed, his jump height decreases down to 60%, meaning his jump would lower down to 70 centimeters. Pete's actual jump height would therefore be between 70 to 120 cm from slowest to fastest canter.
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Now let's get back to jump stamina - each time a horse jumps, a fraction of jump stamina is lost. How much stamina is lost is dependent on how high the jump was. Higher scoped horses are therefore naturally a bit more prone to exhaustion.

What does this mean in practise? The player has to learn to spare stamina by adjusting each jump to the actually needed height of the obstacle - basically, do not overjump every 80cm obstacle as if it's a 120cm obstacle, or else you will likely exhaust your poor horse towards the end of the course. On a calmer horse this is usually easy to learn, as a calm horse will always stay at the speed you want - you'd only need to learn what canter speed matches with what height and remember to ride accordingly. On a hot-blooded horse this can be challenging due to its urge to bolt towards an obstacle. This can lead to overjumping if not handled with precision.

JUMP STAMINA VS ENDURANCE?

A principal difference between the two kinds of stamina, is that endurance is long lived whereas jump stamina is short lived. It can easily take a few minutes to run out of endurance, but the cool down also takes a while. Jump stamina goes up fast if riding carelessly, but also resets quickly. Resetting jump stamina is also automatic in the sense that it doesn't require any active input from the player (other than refrain from jumping for a few seconds) unlike endurance which will keep going up until the player actively chooses to do something about it (slow down to trot or walk).

The two different stamina elements in practise, are in fact what defines one of the biggest differences between arena jumping versus cross country jumping in Tales of Rein Ravine. Arena courses are quick and packed with obstacles in short intervals - endurance is therefore almost irrelevant when jumping arena, as it's nearly impossible to run out of endurance during such a quick course (well, you'd have to mess up real bad 🤣). In cross country on the other hand, jump stamina loses importance as the obstacles are so far apart that the jump stamina almost always has time to reset even if you jump every obstacle at max speed.

SCARED?

Does this all sound a lot to learn? Do not worry, both arena and cross country courses start off so easy that they don't require much keeping up with the stamina bars for a while. The beginner horses are also calm and experienced with a good stamina. Until you have mastered all essential riding skills and start riding younger horses you won't have to worry about this stuff too much.

Let me know what game mechanic you would like to hear about next, and if you have anything to ask about stamina, feel free to ask in the comments.